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All posts for the month September, 2012

China formally entered its first aircraft carrier into service on Tuesday, underscoring its ambitions to be a leading Asian naval power, although the ship is not expected to carry a full complement of planes or be ready for combat for some time.

PLANS Liaoning

The Defense Ministry’s announcement had been long expected and was not directly linked to current tensions with Japan over a disputed group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

In a brief notice on its website, the ministry said the carrier’s commissioning significantly boosted the navy’s combat capabilities and its ability to cooperate in responding to natural disasters and other non-traditional threats.

“It has important significance in effectively safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development benefits, and advancing world peace and common development,” the statement said.

China had partly justified the launching of a carrier by pointing out that it alone among the five permanent United Nations Security Council members had no such craft. That had been particularly glaring given the constant presence in Asia of carriers operated by the U.S. Navy, which maintains 11 worldwide.

President Hu Jintao, also chairman of the commission that controls the military, presided over a ceremony Tuesday morning at the ship’s home port of Dalian, along with Premier Wen Jiabao and top generals. Hu “fully affirmed” the efforts of those working on the ship and called on them to complete all remaining tasks according to the highest standard, the Defense Ministry said.

The carrier is the former Soviet navy’s unfinished Varyag, which was towed from Ukraine in 1998 minus its engines, weaponry and navigation systems. Christened the Liaoning after the northeastern province surrounding Dalian, the ship began sea trials in August 2011 following years of refurbishment.

So far the trial runs of the aircraft carrier have been to test the ship’s propulsion, communications and navigation systems. But launching and recovering fixed-wing aircraft at sea is a much trickier proposition. It will take years to build the proper aircraft, to train pilots to land in adverse weather on a moving deck, and to develop a proper carrier battle group.

An aircraft carrier without aircraft? What are the Chinese thinking? Who is going to train their pilots? Assuming that carrier suitable aircraft can be sourced?

A newly-discovered ancient text labeled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” could prove Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. The Fourth-century papyrus challenges one of the cornerstones of Christian religion: that Jesus was celibate.

The discovery was made by Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King, who specializes in Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible. King made a presentation of her research on Tuesday evening in Rome.The papyrus’s authenticity and date have yet to be confirmed; however King and other scholars are pretty sure they are dealing with a real historic gem.

The Vatican has not yet commented on King’s finding and suggestions.

Text written on an 8cm by 4cm piece of papyrus has Jesus speaking to his disciples saying ‘my wife’ in the Coptic language. The text is written in the old Coptic language on both sides of the papyrus. The inscription on one side is badly damaged and the test is undecipherable. Only two words – ‘my mother’ and ‘three’ – could be identified. However it’s the other side that has sparked the interest.

The phrase ‘my wife’ challenges the settled portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a whore and the Christian concept of abstinence. It casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy,” King told Smithsonian Magazine.

“Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” King said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday.

The initial origin of the text is unclear. The owner who showed it to King found it in 1997 in a collection of papyri that he acquired from the previous owner, who was German. The papyrus is said to originate from Upper Egypt. Professor King says it must be reliable evidence of Jesus’ biography. She claims it was likely composed in Koine around a century after the crucifixion, and later translated into Egyptian Coptic.

Australian Muslims have an absolute right to be offended by content of this video, which insults and denigrates The Prophet who is a central figure of their faith.

While majority of Muslim Australians are peaceful law-abiding citizens, there is obviously a small element that are not. In my view however, to let the expression of that offence to descend into violence and anarchy is NOT acceptable.

Australia is one of few truly multicultural countries of the world. All races and religions are welcomed. All that is asked for is that they leave their hatreds in the lands from whence they came…..What now for Muslim-Western relations?

Diggers caught in media muddle writes the ABC’s Jonathan Green. I was looking to say some of the things and express the same sentiments, but I found that Jonathon has done it so much better than I could have. Here is his article:

“The constant and jingoistic use of the word Digger is at the heart of the effort to secure support for a profoundly unpopular war.

Three Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan were killed last week in what the obscurantist shorthand of modern war terms a ‘green-on-blue’ attack. This is tragic and inherently sad.

Dead in a sudden act of violence: too young, too soon … it’s universally poignant, in or out of war.

By now, a decade into this seemingly ill-starred conflict, we’re all well-schooled in the appropriate responses. Press conferences: from the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Defence Minister, the head of the armed forces.

The media kicks in, as shocked and dismayed each time as the last: more Diggers are dead, the casualty list mounts, public sympathy for the conflict is strained.

This is war, armed conflict. Why do these deaths take us by surprise? Why, in particular, do our politicians seem so shocked when the people they order into war – with all its implication of mortal risk – become its victims?

It’s not hard to sense the competing strains of awkward dualities in all of this. So many lines of tension and contradiction: between the public unease at Australia’s place in the occupying coalition and the almost bellicose jingoism of the press; between the enthusiasm shared across our mainstream politics for ‘staying the course’ in this necessary confrontation with terror and fundamentalism, and the routine shock and sad outrage from those same politicians that our troops might, in the course of that military intervention, become targets.

It’s a muddle.

One certainty here is the declining popular support for Australia’s presence in Afghanistan. According to the most recent Lowy poll:

Just a third (33 per cent) of Australians say Australia should ‘continue to be involved militarily in Afghanistan’, down seven points since last year and from 46 per cent in 2007.
That gives moments like last week a special awkwardness. There was a collective lesson learned through the Vietnam war that serving military can be unfairly sandwiched between a government determined to pursue a conflict in spite of public opinion and a public agitating to end that same unpopular war. Our fighting men and women are, after all, just doing their job.

The media’s role is complex … and interesting in how it hesitates to reflect public opinion of this latest war, an engagement (to generalise not so wildly) it supported from the outset and stands by now.

For proof of that, consider the prominence it gives to the sombre, elaborate pageantry of death. Last night’s news featured footage of “the traditional ramp ceremonies” as our latest Afghanistan fallen came home by air to Queensland’s RAAF Amberley and New South Wales’s RAAF Richmond.

Presumably these ceremonies have only been “traditional” since the arrival of large cargo aircraft and the ramps that deliver their contents, but “traditional” in this context lends gravitas … a sense that what we are seeing is steeped in military history, part of an honoured and honourable continuum, not just the sad product of a war most Australians struggle with.

The Australian media’s language and mood seem critical in the continuing prosecution of this war. Look at the angry, indignant protests this past week when Afghanistan’s president dared criticise the operation that brought two Afghan deaths in the pursuit of the man who killed three Australians.

This editorial from The Australian was typical of the tone:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s ill-tempered outburst over the raid to find the rogue soldier who killed three of our Diggers displays an absence of sensitivity and gratitude that does him no credit and ill-serves the relationship between our two countries.
Punchy and indignant to say the least. Never mind the issue of mismatched equivalence between three soldiers killed on duty and two men – a 70-year-old man and a boy – killed in the subsequent hot pursuit; the second set of deaths (anonymous, suspect) readily justified by the first (heroic).

Never mind all that. Never mind the oddness of this heated affront at what are simply the expressed views of the regime we are purportedly fighting in Afghanistan to nurture and protect.

Never mind “ill-tempered” and “gratitude”; in a funny way, the key word is “Diggers”, because here, in this one loaded word, we see the strands pull together. Here we see how between them military, politics and media seek to support a profoundly unpopular war by constant reference to something deep and almost unquestionably revered in our national culture.

Think what you like of our presence in Afghanistan, respect Our Diggers – men and women treading a path that has its origins in the honourable mass sacrifice of the early twentieth century.

It’s a proper noun, readily capitalised, and a headline favourite:

Diggers killed in Afghanistan on ‘black day’

Defence names diggers killed by rogue Afghan soldier

‘Tough day’ as fallen Diggers flown home to Australia

Wanted: Diggers’ killer revealed

‘Fair winds’ as fallen Diggers travel home from Afghanistan

Defence names fallen diggers

Afghan insider captured as Diggers hunt killer

Its repeated use draws a line from Afghanistan to the stiff-upper Aussie lip that confronted the years of almost generational slaughter in World War I. It gives respect to our fighting forces, whose deaths now are as real and violent as any in the trenches of Gallipoli or the Western Front.

But its use also recalls another similar circumstance: that our troops are in Afghanistan not so much through reason and necessity, but through the demands of alliance and realpolitik; heeding the call of a new century’s empire.

And that’s where the muddle begins … and where maybe the conflation of all this history lets us down”.

Jonathan Green is a former editor of The Drum and presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National.

For those readers who may not understand the significance of the term Digger, it is a term of pride, honour and to a certain extent endearment, bestowed on Australian and New Zealand servicemen and women who are on active service, or those who have returned from active service. It is similar in meaming the English term “Tommy” of WWI/WWII. Digger originated from the ANZAC campaign at Gallipoli and the Western Front where ANZAC soldiers became adept at digging their trenches for their own protection. ANZACs believed that it was a compliment to be referred to as diggers, because it indicated you were good at a very difficult job.
Thus the ANZACS were proud of the term “Digger” whereas the British resented the term “Tommy” to a certain extent.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com – that is, I was a featured blog on their home page. As a result, I got more traffic and more interesting comments from people in one day than I have since I began blogging. Thanks, WordPress editors!

I’ve been really excited and inspired by the exchanges I’ve had with others, including the ideas and themes we all started circling around. Most of the dialogue was about a post I made on technology, memory, and creativity. Here, I was interested in the idea that the more we remember the more creative we may be simply because we have a greater amount of “material” to work with. If this is the case, what does it mean that, for many of us, we are using extremely efficient and fast technologies to “outsource” our memory for all sorts of things?…

This Is Me

George Brown is a decorated soldier and health professional and 40 year veteran in the field of emergency nursing and paramedical practice, both military and civilian areas. He has senior management positions in the delivery of paramedical services. Opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the author and should not be construed as being those of any organization to which he may be connected.

He was born in the UK of Scottish ancestry from Aberdeen and a member of the Clan MacDougall. He is a member of the Macedonian community in Newcastle, and speaks fluent Macedonian. While this may seem a contradiction, it is his wife who is Macedonian, and as a result he embraced the Macedonian language and the Orthodox faith.

His interests include aviation and digital photography, and he always enjoys the opportunity to combine the two. Navigate to his Flickr site to see recent additions to his photo library.